Infinite Stratos 02: Haven’t I seen this before six years ago?

I heard you like beam spam“We meet again Kira Yamato….now *I* am the master…”

So against all better judgement, here I am writing about Infinite Stratos part Deux. To be fair to the series, it does get better once they get SkyMio’s (predictably trite) antics over with and get to the duel proper, which is generally well animated unless you really squint and pick bones out of your CGI egg. Setting aside the anime fetish of once again bringing a sword to a gunfight, we get the over the top action we expect from a less pantsu oriented version of Strike Witches, down to the usual hewing down of projectiles as if they were redneck beer cans and even a “Shaving off my life by putting my energies into my attack!” attack, which would have elicited a groan from me if I hadn’t used it on the unwelcome Gundam Seed memories this fight brought back.

We also get a bit of backstory on her Mio-ness and her sister, who is chief boffin behind the mysterious IS system, complete with DUM-DUM-DUM a black box of a core. The sister (who I see is voiced by her petite Shiro Akuma-ness), is either a wanderer or has gone missing, and the two are estranged. All this I guess is meant to set the stage for later Shocking Developments(tm) where their WHOOSH WHOOSH battle-armour is not as simple as it seems to their young users.

The harem aspects kick in hard again at the end of the show (once the duel ends and Cecilia starts to feel the ramifications of that inconclusive encounter), and I’m still shaking my head at the preview, which promises YET ANOTHER osananajimi, unbelievably presented as a fang-tan twintail from CHINA. This is going to be one of those anime of two halves, and in the scenario of liking one and disliking the other, how much of the disliked portion you can stomach.

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